Remember Lea

Acclaimed pop band and urban romantics Saint Etienne tell Sean O'Hagan how they have lovingly captured on film a vast, derelict part of east London before it disappears for ever to make way for the Olympic megapolis

As London landmarks go, the Hackney fridge mountain in east London is not quite up there with Nelson's Column or the Post Office Tower, but it was a sight to behold all the same. The largest pile of discarded refrigerators in Europe, it towered over Carpenters Road and its environs, a monument to consumerism, and a veritable Everest of trapped CFC gas. Now, it is gone, though where - ominously - no one seems to know.

The allotments on nearby Marshgate Lane have disappeared too. A lone oasis of fertility among the concrete, Tarmac and scrublands of the Hackney Wick hinterlands, they have been bulldozed, then covered in landfill. Gone, too, is the famous Hackney dog track. The Olympic Park is coming to the Lower Lea Valley in all its futuristic splendour, and greyhounds chasing a stuffed toy around a floodlit track would probably have lowered the tone. Suddenly, the Cosy Cafe on Waterden Road, a cross between a storage container and a disused railway carriage, looks like the last outpost of a traditional, rapidly disappearing East End.

Just three miles from central London, the Lower Lea Valley's 1,000-acre expanse of derelict industrial land and waterways was the obvious site for the 2012 bid team's dream Olympic compound. It is about to be erased almost entirely, then dramatically rebuilt as a parkland-set Olympic megapolis complete with athletics stadium, velodrome, swimming pools, press centre and £650 million athletes' village.

It is here, among the lunchtime labourers and lorry drivers, their faces buried in the sports pages of the Sun and Star, that I have convened with Bob Stanley, songwriter with celebrated postmodern pop group Saint Etienne and film-maker and one-time band member Paul Kelly to begin a short, guided tour of the area. Over six weeks this summer, the pair roamed the Lower Lea Valley filming warehouses, burnt-out cars and overgrown canals. What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? their homage to this neglected landscape, premieres - complete with live musical accompaniment - at the Barbican in London on Thursday.

Through the smudged windows of the Cosy Cafe, as far as the eye can see, there is an expanse of grey, criss-crossed by through-roads, pockmarked by pylons. It does not look promising. The air smells chemical, and even the dust seems greasy. Miles Evans, the Barbican's press officer, mentions that there is a cooking-fat recycling plant nearby as well as a kebab meat factory.

'It's a bit grim, to tell the truth,' says Bob Stanley, whose idea it was to follow up 2003's Finisterre, Saint Etienne's acclaimed cinematic hymn to London, with a similar homage to the Lower Lea Valley. 'We realised early on that we couldn't make the same kind of poetic film even if we had wanted to. With Finisterre, we had the whole of London to play with. But the Lea Valley is a bit more, erm, restrictive. There's no real precedent for what we are trying to do.'

Stanley, as the dreamily impressionistic songs he writes for Saint Etienne often suggest, is a master of understatement. Kelly, on the other hand, whose job it is to turn this blighted landscape into a thing of windswept beauty, does not mince his words. 'It's a horrible place,' he says, sounding like someone who has lingered too long in what London's resident psycho-geographer, Iain Sinclair, calls 'the liminal lands', a neglected, in-between place in the heart of a fast-forward city, where another history, embedded, unofficial, murky, hangs heavy but invisible in the air.

'Part of me never wants to come here ever again,' he sighs, as we leave the Cosy Cafe in search of a tile factory, 'and part of me thinks we have to record this place before it all disappears. The speed of change, now it has finally come, is startling.' He signals across the road to where the allotments once stood. 'They've all been flattened since we filmed a few weeks ago. It's already looking like a different place. It's like the future is finally coming to Hackney Wick.'

This is indeed the case. With the unexpected success of the Olympic bid, the film has taken on an almost talismanic significance, a lingering glimpse of a forgotten swathe of one of the poorest parts of London.

'We started filming thinking, like everyone else, that the bid would almost certainly fail,' elaborates Stanley, 'and that we were celebrating a neglected place, a part of east London that had somehow missed out on investment and redevelopment every time, that had been overlooked since Victorian times. Now it's literally disappearing bit by bit, week by week.'

Saint Etienne have always been a London pop group, though not as obviously so as the Kinks, Madness or Squeeze. Their last outing, Tales from Turnpike Lane was a concept album about the lives of various residents in a fictional north London tower block. Bob Stanley, one suspects, is the architect of their London-centric obsessions, an urban romantic drawn irresistibly to the neglected or overlooked, those arbiters of everydayness such as the second-hand record shop and the greasy spoon. The London that Bob Stanley loves is quickly disappearing though, endangered by the onward rush of cultural and commercial homogenisation, the tyranny of the chain store and the coffee bar franchise.

If Finisterre celebrated the city, old and new, in the style of an old BBC documentary - part public information film, part Betjeman ode - the band has opted this time to punctuate their impressionistic footage with a fictional narrative. The inspiration may well be Norman Cohen's 1967 film The London Nobody Knows, which they have cited often, and in which James Mason wanders the empty music halls and disappearing communities of the capital. In Saint Etienne's film, the Mason role is taken by a fictional paper boy, Mervyn Day, named after the much-loved Seventies West Ham player.

'I got my nephew to play him,' says Kelly. 'He looks the part, and he never has to speak. Through him, we hear his granddad's thoughts and his mother's. It's just a device to allow us to conjure up that almost ghostly sense of the past that you feel out here.'

The mother's voice belongs to Linda 'Birds of a Feather' Robson, and the granddad's to David Essex, a Canning Town boy by birth. 'We told him we were making a film about the Lea Valley,' says Bob, 'and he just looked blank. Even people who come from these parts never call it that. It's like it doesn't even exist in the local imagination.'

We stand on a mound of weed-covered landfill near the cycle track, and look left towards the twin towers of the Clays Lane estate, the only housing conurbation in the Lower Lea Valley. To the right, across the Lea River, Hackney Marshes begin, mapped out in the chalk-dust rectangles of Sunday-league football pitches, endless rows of goal posts stretching into the distance. All this too, as far as the eye can see, will be restructured in time for 2012. As we follow the path of the river, which seems to become a canal, the remains of old mill machinery scar the opposite bank, remnants of the late Victorian age when the Lea was a thriving industrial waterway. Now, there is only neglect.

On a green wrought-iron footbridge, graffiti spells out local discontent, both personal and political: 'Fuck Seb Coe' and 'Zoe is a Slut (just kidding)'. Then, around the corner looms the tile factory, Dominion Tiles, as towering as its name. The owner stands proudly in front of a shed the size of a jumbo jet hangar and tells us there are six million tiles in there - Thirties art deco to Sixties psychedelia and beyond, stacked in rickety towers stretching up to the corrugated ceiling. Broken tiles are scattered in piles everywhere, little jigsaw puzzles of dust-coated shapes and colours. Stanley seems moved by all this, and it is not hard to see why. This, too, is history of a sort.

There is history aplenty in the Lower Lea Valley, for all the neglect and decay that now characterises the landscape. The street names alone are steeped in it: Pudding Mill Lane, Sugarhouse Lane and Waterworks River. The building that housed the Bryant and May match factory, where the match girls famously went on strike and begat the Labour Movement, still stands in nearby Bow. Around the corner on Wallis Road, a tiny plaque stuck absurdly high on a brick wall announces with little fanfare that plastic was invented here. As Bob Stanley puts it: 'Right here, in Hackney Wick, they invented the future.' Elsewhere, nature has started to take over again, with algae and moss creeping over concrete and steel.

A few weeks later, in a cramped editing suite in Soho, I watch some rushes of Saint Etienne's film. On the screen, the place looks implausibly, surreally beautiful, transformed by the camera into a place of mysterious possibility. 'It's like the opposite of a holiday snap, where you take a photograph of a beautiful mountain and it comes out looking crap,' says Kelly. 'We've managed to take all the grimness and greyness and make it look beautiful.'

He seems somewhat baffled by this act of cinematic alchemy. 'The Lower Lea Valley lives on,' he says, 'but not as we knew it.'

And so the mission of Saint Etienne, the capital's unlikeliest social historians, continues apace.

· Saint Etienne's What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? premieres at the Barbican, London EC1 on Thursday. The show includes a live musical performance by the band. For tickets, call 020 7638 8891 or go to www.barbican.org.uk